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Comically Missing The Point / Music

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Comically Missing the Point in Music.

  • The radio-play censors appear to have succumbed to this in airplay versions of Aerosmith's "Janie's Got A Gun": In a song about Parental Incest, the one line they feel obliged to alter is "put a bullet in his brain". Right, that's the one thing about the song that makes its subject matter mature...
  • The Beatles did this deliberately in many of their interviews.
    Press: Does it bother you that you can't hear what you sing during concerts?
    John Lennon: No, we don't mind. We've got the records at home.
  • In "Uneasy Rider" by the Charlie Daniels Band, the singer accuses a hostile redneck threatening to beat him up of everything from being an undercover FBI agent to having a Commie flag tacked up on the wall of his garage, so as to turn the redneck's equally conservative friends against him and slip away in the resulting chaos. The redneck's rebuts most of Daniels' charges in kind, but his rebuttal to the last charge is to just note that he doesn't have a garage, not that he doesn't own any kind of Communist material.
  • Christmas With The Tabernacle Choir: As John Rhys-Davies as the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Charles Dickens over the city to let him see things as they truly are, he looks and sees houses, hundreds of houses, filled with people...buying books!
    Ghost of Christmas Present: No, it's not about books!
  • Daniel Amos:
    • The album ¡Alarma! has a short story in the liner notes. In one scene, a woman sees a starving child and goes to help. She hands the kid a piece of paper that says "I love you", then walks away.
    • "Autographs for the Sick" (from Doppelgänger) is about a huge, televangelist-hosted revival that winds up giving everyone exactly what they don't need:
      Phonographs for the deaf, they can't hear you
      Gloves for the amputees, they can't cheer you
      Down at the stadium they're waiting for the end of the age
      You're praying for the healthy while the lame never get to the stage
  • Flight of the Conchords has several songs about Comically Missing the Point, most notably "Think About It", a goldmine of Missed Points — one verse laments the use of slave labor to produce sneakers... because it hasn't lowered the cost of sneakers enough. Later in the same song, there's this:
    A man is lying on the street
    Some punk's chopped off his head
    And I'm the only one who stops to see if he's dead
    Turns out he's dead
  • Jaron and the Long Road to Love gives us this gem in "Pray for You":
    Haven't been to church since I don't remember when
    Things were goin' great, 'til they fell apart again
    I listened to the preacher as he told me what to do
    He said you can't go hating others who have done wrong to you
    Sometimes we get angry but we must not condemn
    Let the good Lord do his job and you just pray for them
    [beat]
    I pray your brakes go out running down a hill...
  • Comes up at the end of The Lonely Island's "Threw It On the Ground". The singer is an over-the-top Jerkass who keeps throwing things people give him on the ground because of his Hair-Trigger Temper leading him to proclaim that he's "not part of your system!" When his behavior pisses off a pair of actors who proceed to tase him for it, he concludes, "the moral of this story is... you can't trust the system, man!" One of the verses also gives us this little gem:
    At the Farmer's Market with my so-called girlfriend
    She hands me her cellphone, says it's my dad
    Man, this ain't my dad, this is a cellphone
  • In Lukas Graham's song "Strip No More", the narrator reveals that he has fallen in love with a stripper called Destiny, who was friendly with him and sexually initiated him. When he returns to the club, her co-workers greet him cordially and explain that Destiny just graduated from university. He can't understand why that means she's quit her job. It never occurs to the young idiot that she was stripping to fund her education, that her real name wasn't Destiny, and that she's an entirely different person from the "girl I knew". It was all glamour and he doesn't even realize it.
  • Jim Steinman's monologue "Love and Death and an American Guitar", released on the Meat Loaf album Back Into Hell as "Wasted Youth", catalogues the adventures of a boy who murders people with his guitar. Finally, he attacks his parents:
    "... and just as I was about to bring the guitar crashing down upon the centre of the bed, my father woke up screaming, 'Stop! Wait a minute! Stop it, boy! That's no way to treat an expensive musical instrument!'"
  • The Velvet Underground's song "Sister Ray". The narrator's entire reaction to somebody getting shot is, "You shouldn't do that/Don't you know you'll stain the carpet?"
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic:
    • In "You Don't Love Me Anymore", this is the calm conclusion the narrator reaches after the object of his affection has tried to murder him several times.
    • The song "Why Does this Always Happen to Me?" focuses on this trope, as it's about a guy who focuses on trivial inconveniences in the face of much larger events. While watching The Simpsons, the show is interrupted by a news report of a devastating earthquake which kills thousands, and he's more concerned about the fact that he's missing his program while taping it, and will now need to wait for a rerun of the episode. When his friend is killed in a massive traffic accident, he's angry that his friend still owed him $5 before he died, and the resulting traffic jam will cause him to be late for work. And finally, after straight-up stabbing his boss in the face at work, he's more concerned about the fact that his knife got stuck, and he fears that he's dulled his knife to the point where it won't be as sharp as it once was beforehand.

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